Students Face(book)ing suspension

Wizard of Id: The peasants are revolting.
King: They certainly are. - Johnny Hart

Students in the Minneapolis suburban community of Eden Prairie are facing disciplinary actions after their Facebook photos are sent to school officials. The Star-Tribune story is here. AP article here.

Interesting factoid from the AP story:

Eden Prairie High School has about 3,300 students, and Facebook lists about 2,800 members in its network for the school, including more than 500 from the current senior class. A spot check Wednesday showed some have posted dozens and even hundreds of pictures. However, most members use a privacy setting to limit access to their profiles to authorized users.

Johnson's three safety concerns of the social web from Rules for the Social Web, Threshold, Summer 2007:

• Protecting children from predators.
• Protecting children from each other (cyberbulling).
• Protecting children from themselves.

If the figures from the article above are accurate, about 85% of Eden Prairie's students have an online presence. Are educators adequately addressing these concerns? What percentage of educators are aware of these concerns?

BTW, nice to see some school walkouts again. Takes me back to when my classmates and I walked out as high school students. But for us it was protesting a pro-Vietnam war legislator speaking at our high school during the late 60s. 

Guide to media re-mixing

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video from American University's School of Communication looks to be an understandable guide to what all our wanna-be Ken Burns re-mixers can and can't do with copyrighted material in their own videos. There is a link to a good video clip from the Chronicle for Higher Ed on the page as well.

The basic idea here is that "fair use" is broader than usually interpreted, especially in the areas of parody and criticism. There is a great list of examples in a variety of categories of fair use, including Satire and Parody, Negative or Critical Commentary, Positive Commentary, and Quoting in Order to Start a Discussion.

Maybe it's time we started teaching kids more about what they CAN do with copyrighted material than what they CAN'T do with it if we want avoid raising a bunch of scofflaws?

(Thanks to Bill DeJohn at U of M's Minitex for the head's up.

Google Docs - maybe not

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when. John Arlidge  Google. Who's looking at you? Times of London Online, October 21, 2007. (Thanks to Stephen's Lighthouse for this link.)

As do many Internet users, I take major advantage of Google products. The search engines (of course), the iGoogle startpage, gmail, and more recently, Google Docs. Our tech department has even been tossing around the idea of replacing our Exchange e-mail/calendaring/contacts server with an institutional version of Google Apps. The ease, effectiveness, and cost - or lack thereof - make Google's stuff very, very seductive.

But are we paying a hidden, very high price - our privacy - for Google's services? I agree with Stephen Abrams when he suggests that "[The above] article should be must reading in all information literacy education. Our users (and ourselves) should be making conscious choices."

I've written about the need for teaching students to be making informed choices about how much information they provide online "So Tell Us a Little About Yourself" that goes beyond simply protecting oneself from strangers. My recommendation in 2003 was:

“How much do you want others to know about you?” is a question we should be asking our students to ask themselves. It is a question that can only have a personal answer. But it should be an informed answer.

I'll stand by that. And suggest that the issue is more important now than ever.

Oh, for those of you who Twitter each stray thought, personal itch, and titch of gossip, do you ever wonder who might be collecting and analyzing these bits?